Today while browsing the wide wide web i came across an ad for Flock, although i had heard the name before i saw it as another social networking site or product and passed it by.
Not that I’m against the social network scene but the reason was i just have too many logins and accounts floating all over the place.
So today I decided to see what it was.
Flock is basically Firefox….. but uses twice as much ram again if you know what i mean.
Included in the browser we have a social side bar, where once logged in (or signed up) to all our favourite social media sites we can view all of them together in a simple yet effective view. When i say view them I mean.
- Status updates
- Friends online
- New wall posts
- New Digg stories
- Twitter friends and posts
- Youtube videos
- etc..
You can also post to your own social sites and blog… all from the browser..
In fact I am blogging to my new wordpress.com blog from the flock interface as we speak.
So what are the pro’s and cons.
I am going to start with the negative first because it is a big problem and has been for sometime, and now will be further more, and that is memory. Flock is based on Mozilla technology, which is great don’t get me wrong, the only reason i have IE6 and 7 is to test my web designs to make sure they work.. i am and always will be a Firefox user. but we all know Firefox is a memory hog, and now with flock just adding on all these social tool bars and sidebars… you can imagine what it is like
Now i haven’t had a chance to see what extensions work or don’t work with it so i cant comment there yet, hopefully I can add in all my favourite web extensions and have Flock just like my Firefox, but then i guess we will see the memory usage spike some more.
As for Pro’s
the social interface is lovely, works well, although it is bloated with options and features, it feels very lite and easy which is what i love. everything is where it should be and works like it always has.
Final say: I would open flock every other day to have a play, but at the end of the day if i open face book in Firefox, its going to work without using 200-300meg of ram.